We All Fall Down

This week I had the wonderful fortune to escape to the woods with my yoga school classmates for a three-day intensive. Our gracious teachers led us through 10-hour days of study and practice, keeping our minds and bodies in constant motion. We covered a lot of ground in the arenas of asana, teaching methodology, and philosophy but where I saw the most progress was in the opening of our hearts to one another. We arrived at the retreat as nineteen yoga buddies and left as one family. 

This may sound dramatic, but I heartily profess that the change was dramatic both for individuals and the group. I was part of a twenty-four student cohort for four semesters in college and have worked in small offices throughout my career, yet I have never experienced anything like this. What occurred was deeper than social bonding over a mutual love of a topic or activity. It was an amazing discovery of the common threads of our human experience and a sharing of our true selves. 

It is very difficult for me to translate this experience into words. Yoga school is intense but not just because of the time commitment and the volume of knowledge there is to digest. The most challenging part is how studying the path of yoga has forced me to take a sincere look at who I am inside and the actions that I take. Why am I reacting this way? Is there a pattern in my behavior? Can I accept the things about me I don't like? Can I share the things I don't like about myself with others? Can I let go? What is my purpose? What calls to me? Can I be right here in this moment? Can I sit with this feeling? Every day I find new questions to ask myself, and when I listen honestly the answers aren't always pretty. 

On my own, I might have given up on this journey of self-discovery because I'm finding a lot of skeletons in my darkness. It has not been easy to accept that traits I have long criticized in other people are at home within me, too. It has been humbling to realize that I have just as much in common with my enemies as I do my friends. It has been extremely painful to be tender and open with those who are not yet able to offer me kindness. 

Luckily I am not on my own. Over the course of the intensive, my classmates and I were able to accelerate past the pleasantries and begin to speak wholeheartedly to each other. We listened, we cried, and we ate an embarrassing amount of chocolate. We engaged in honest conversations about ourselves, our struggles, and our fears–and we uncovered the similarities that run through our veins. We are all asking ourselves the hard questions, and while our answers might be different we are all arriving at them with authenticity and humility. 

We all face challenges. We all fall down. And as one of my classmates reminded me, we all have the ability to get back up. We have the ability to be true to ourselves. It's an effort that we make every day, and I'm finding it isn't quite as hard when I have the support of such a loving community.

Learning to Learn

When I enrolled in yoga teacher training, I had low aspirations regarding the teaching part. I was primarily interested in discovering the secret of why yoga makes me feel so good. I wanted to dive deep into the postures, traditions, and philosophy to understand how I could more fully weave yoga into my life off the mat. If along the way I learned how to lead a group of strangers through a sixty minute vinyasa class, that would be the icing on the cake.

I'm about halfway through the program now and my attitude toward teaching has shifted. I am much more excited about sharing my passion and creating opportunities for others to explore the magic of yoga. In fact, I can't wait! The trouble is that the more I learn about teaching yoga, the less prepared I feel to teach yoga. It's like I'm going backwards. Why do I feel like I know less after studying so much?

Early in the program we discussed the challenge of learning something new in psychology class. My teacher summarized it this way: our critical framework about an activity increases at a much more rapid pace than our ability to actually perform the activity. Basically when we first attempt to learn something new, we have very little baseline information about what it takes to do it well. This makes us believe that we will soon be accomplished at our new endeavor. But as we start to study intensively, the amount of information we acquire about how to do it well grows by leaps and bounds. All of a sudden mastery seems like it is so far away, and by comparison we seem to gain so little ground when we practice. This is the point at which many people quit. The goal seems unattainable so why continue to put in the time and effort?

I can relate. I have learned so much about yoga in the past nine weeks–even about the basic postures that I thought I had in the bag–that I now realize I don't know very much about yoga at all! I may have been practicing for eight years and I may take level 3 vinyasa classes, but learning how to teach yoga has forced me to admit that I am still a beginner. I thought that it would be relatively easy to talk someone through the poses I greet like old friends, but I am learning how many moving parts I have to consider as a yoga teacher–all at the same time! There's anatomy, breath work, alignment, cueing, observation, refinements, demonstrations, feedback, sequencing, adjustments...and the list goes on. 

The more I learn about teaching yoga the more I discover there is to learn. There is no finish line up ahead. But instead of being discouraged by this, I am greatly encouraged. I will be able to study yoga for my entire life and there will always be something new to learn–and to teach. 

There is a wonderful anecdote from Ira Glass on this topic that I first heard at yoga school. It's a great tribute to persistence when learning something new. You can find the quote here. Enjoy!

It's a Trap!

I wrote earlier this month about how much sadness I was carrying around about my birthday approaching this year. The thought of celebrating on my own had invoked a fresh sense of loss, and I had concerns that I might just have a total meltdown when the day finally arrived. But I didn't. It turned out that the day I was dreading became a spectacular reminder of something that I seem to easily forget: I am loved. 

What I discovered on my birthday reminded me of a story that I read in The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo. He wrote about a clever monkey trap that was created by putting food into a hollowed-out coconut with a small hole cut into the side. The monkey can reach his hand into the coconut to grab the food, but once he closes his hand it no longer fits through the hole. The monkey is essentially trapped because he's hanging on to the food. All the monkey needs to do to free himself is to let go of what's in his hand, but in his hunger he holds tight–even though there is food to be found elsewhere. 

Mark Nepo shared how we as humans do this same thing. We cling to the things we want so tightly that we become stuck and unable to let go, even when these things are not serving us. That's how I felt as my birthday crept up this year. I wanted so badly to be loved that I had desperately grabbed back on to a dream that was causing me pain. I was trapped and unable to move forward, afraid to let go of a possibility for love because I didn't think I could find it anywhere else. 

Yet all along I have been surrounded by love. I just didn't recognize it until my birthday when I was overwhelmed by the love and kindness of family, friends, coworkers, classmates, and even strangers. The generosity of the people in my life was extraordinary, as they shared time, thoughts, talents, and treasures with me. I was truly surprised by the response, though I realize now I should not have been. These caring people have been in my life all along, supporting me and offering their love. I just wasn't able to see and accept what they were sharing because my fist was closed so tightly. Now I feel lighter because I can relax my hand and surrender, moving forward with gratitude for the loving people in my life.

And the Winner Is...

Yoga–as it was intended–is not a competitive activity. We are not supposed to be in a competition with other people in the room nor in a battle against ourselves. In fact, the postures that we call yoga today were integrated into the traditional yogic path in recent history. When yoga was developing before the Common Era, a yogi practiced seated meditation and the stool that he sat on was an asana. In our current lexicon asana means pose or posture. Over hundreds of years the postures that we are familiar with were woven into the yogic practice. While it is true that they help us to bring balance and health to our bodies, their purpose is even deeper. BKS Iyengar, one of the most familiar names in the world of yoga, wrote in his classic Light on Yoga that the postures’ “real importance lies in the way they train and discipline the mind.”

At no point is anything mentioned about competition. When we come to our mats, we must leave our egos at the door alongside our shoes and jackets. We are asked to turn our focus inward instead of getting caught up in what’s happening around us. We are told to give our attention to our minds and bodies instead of comparing ourselves to other students in the class. The goal isn’t to fold deeper into a posture than the next person or stand in Vrksasana (tree pose) without losing my balance for longer than the student next to me.

In yoga school I have been assigned homework where I am instructed to watch how other students respond to cues from the teacher, and it makes me uncomfortable. It feels strange to watch other people as they practice because that is not how I have been trained to approach a yoga class. I have been taught to focus on my own body and listen closely to what it is telling me that day. I may challenge my body and mind, but I practice with compassion. I accept where I am instead of forcing myself to do more than I am capable of in a competition with my expectations. And when I can do all of this, I leave class with a lightness and calm that is hard to find anywhere else.

Inherent in this approach to practicing yoga is the belief that where we are right now is okay. We already have everything we need within us, and there is no place that we have to get to. We are asked to be content right where we are and to refrain from judging ourselves through comparisons with others. I find this is much easier to do on my mat than it is outside the walls of the studio, but the idea is the same. Wherever I am on my path is okay. I am as stretched as I can be right now, and there is no measuring stick to compare myself to. If I can cultivate this sense of contentment in the present moment, wherever I might be, I can find peace. 

1-Up

Over the years I have repeatedly heard my yoga teachers say, “It’s never the same pose twice.” Each time you enter into a posture, it will look different than the last time and the time before that. My teachers have explained that there are countless variables that affect the shapes we are able to make with our bodies on any given day. These can be internal variables like whether or not you’ve eaten, the presence of muscle soreness, how much stress you are under, and your ability to concentrate. There are also external variables such as the temperature of the room, the time of day, and the music that is playing. Considering the unlimited combinations of these factors, each time you come into the pose you are approaching it from a different starting point–and that naturally changes where you end up.

I experience this every time I am on my mat. One day I might be feeling so strong and focused that I launch into crow pose and balance neatly on my hands. Another day I might not even attempt to pick my feet up off the ground, because my physical or emotional foundation is too shaky and I am afraid of a face plant. This happens in more basic poses, too, where there is no question about being able to make the shape yet it looks and feels different from one sequence to the next. My ability to execute a posture on any given day is certainly influenced by the skills I have built through years of practicing, but they're not the whole story.

This is really exciting to me. Each time I practice the pose I get to start over, or–as I sometimes think of it–I get to pass Go and collect $200. It doesn't matter that yesterday I toppled over while attempting crow pose. Today I am approaching it from a place I've never stood before, and I have no way of knowing the exact outcome. I only know it will be different.

I think this is a realistic yet optimistic way to view yoga practice and life as a whole. In each moment we get a chance to start anew. No one has ever taken the step I am about to take. And no matter the background of the situation or the patterns of behavior I typically fall into, I get to decide what I do with that moment. The result is unknown; if I don't like it, I have learned something. Then I can take a deep breath and push the reset button, because I get to start over. 

There's No Crying in Baseball

I love birthdays. I love celebrating other people's birthdays, and I especially love to celebrate mine. As soon as Christmas is over it's on my radar, and I've been known to talk about my birthday for months in advance. This year I was feeling just as enthusiastic, or so I thought.

I decided to throw myself a party, since I'm in charge of my own festivities this year. True to form, I started talking about it in January. I was so excited to celebrate with a group of my friends, especially because my social life became relatively nonexistent with yoga school. But on the first of this month I flipped the calendar page–revealing a friendly-looking (dare I say curious?) moose–and I saw the word March in big black letters. Whereas this would normally give me a jolt of excitement (especially the moose part), I unexpectedly started to cry. 

I spent a lot of time that day thinking and writing about what I was feeling, and I uncovered it was overwhelming sadness. For the past twelve years I have spent my birthday with my husband, and I had the expectation that I would for fifty more. When I thought about being surrounded by the people I care about most, it hit me really hard that he wasn't going to be there. It felt all wrong, but I was masking those feelings in my rush to get to the next point on my timeline. 

Immediately after I realized I was feeling a deep sense of loss, I got mad at myself for feeling that way. I began rationalizing why I shouldn't be feeling sad: I'm having good days; the sun is shining; I'm living with curiosity; I like who I am. If these things are true, I shouldn't be feeling sad. Sadness is a step backward and I'm supposed to be moving forward. I unconsciously started to put all my energy into powering through the sadness.

One of my teachers is fond of giving the direction to "feel into the pose." She will lead the class into a particularly challenging posture and then ask students to remain there for several breaths. She instructs students to notice what's happening in their bodies in that moment and to acknowledge the various sensations. Sometimes my body is feeling a juicy stretch and sometimes it is angry and burning, but I'm asked to withhold judgment and just listen. Only then am I instructed to release and move into the next pose.

I know that I need to allow myself to feel into the sadness in this same way. I need to sit with it. I have to listen to what I am feeling–let the sadness fully penetrate me–before I can leave it behind. Instead of getting mad at myself for being human, I can be compassionate. I can withhold judgment, even if I'm crying. 

It's Part of the Poetry

I've been listening to the song "Rise" by A Skylit Drive over and over again this week. (Please note, if you are offended by certain four-letter words, you may not want to add this to your playlist.) It doesn't belong in my top ten list or anything, but two lines caught my attention and I've been chewing on them all week. The chorus starts like this: "Do not pray for an easy life, search for the strength to walk the line."  

Wait, what? Don't wish for an easy life? That doesn't make any sense. We want things to be easy. We feel good when we get the things that we want, and I think most of us would prefer that this happen with as little work as possible. Or with just enough effort for us to feel like we deserved the reward. Even if we are talking about non-material desires like finding a relationship or figuring out what to do with our lives, most of us would like to have the answer just handed over to us. 

I have been very fortunate in my life, and I do try to be mindful of this. While I've had to work hard for certain things that I've wanted, those were the exceptions to the rule. A year ago I was coasting along as usual, happy with my job, my husband, my dog, my house. Stability felt good. Easy felt good. Then the rug was pulled out from under me, and no matter what I did I couldn't find the ground under my feet. For maybe the first time in my life, I was challenged beyond anything I thought I could accomplish. How would I make it through the day? How would I move forward?

It did not take me long to discover just how powerful it is to struggle and how much I can learn from the messy process. In the past few months, I have uncovered strength that I didn't know I possessed. I have become more compassionate than I thought I could be. I have unleashed creativity and passion that was hidden from my view. I wish it wouldn't have taken such a painful event for me to learn these things about myself, but it seems I needed a really big push to break out of my comfort zone. My struggles and failures have helped me to be more true to myself, and for that I am extremely grateful. 

Does this mean I don't want things to come easy to me anymore? Not necessarily. Easy can still be good sometimes! But I'm going to grow a lot more when the path is rocky, and I'm not going to be so afraid of the bumps. 

The Leg Bone's Connected to...

Everything in our bodies is intimately connected to everything else. This might not be a revelation but it is a theme that comes up almost daily in my anatomy and asana classes. Each joint is controlled by the actions of multiple muscles, some of which span across two or more distinct joints in the body. A muscle that moves the knee might also help to move the hip, for example. This means that movement in our body is rarely limited to the joint we are focused on.

I have recently noticed how this affects me in uttanasana (standing forward fold). It seems like a fairly straight-forward pose. Stand with your feet hip-distance apart and fold over from the waist to touch your hands to the ground. I have always been flexible, so touching my hands to the mat has never been challenging for me. However, now that I'm learning the detailed mechanics of the pose I have discovered that I've been doing more harm than good with this posture. Like most people who sit at a desk all day long, I have tight hamstrings. In order to come into uttanasana, something along the back of my body needs to lengthen so I can fold forward to touch my mat, and it should be my hamstrings. However, since my hamstrings are too tight to give me the length I need–but I force my hands to the ground anyway in my quest of the perfect shape–the movement spreads to a different part of my body. A pose that should provide a beneficial stretch to my hamstrings becomes one that puts a lot of strain on my lower back. With regular practice, this repetitive action can cause injury. 

As I was thinking about how actions in our bodies are not isolated but interrelated, I started to see how this is true off of the mat, too. Often we think that we can act a certain way in a situation and it won't have any impact on the rest of our daily life. In that moment we have a choice to take a right action or not, and for whatever reason we decide not to. Maybe I get cranky with the customer service agent when I call to find out why my cable bill doubled. Maybe you shout something nasty to a driver who cuts you off. Or these could be bigger actions, like taking the hotel towels home (because no one will ever miss them, right?) or flirting with a coworker even though you are married. These seem like discrete and inconsequential actions, ones that probably won't have any effect on the parts of our life that we care about. 

The trouble with these 'wrong' actions is that they don't just stay relegated to the immaterial parts of our life. If I angrily confront a server for messing up my order, that interaction impacts me beyond the walls of the restaurant even if I never give it a moment's thought after I walk out the door. The truth is that all of our actions count, even the little ones. Every time we avoid right action we make it a little easier to ignore right action the next time, and our wrong actions slowly become patterns and behaviors that seep into all parts of our life. 

When we continue to choose wrong actions, they eventually seem not so wrong anymore. If we continue to yell at other drivers when we get angry, it becomes easier to lash out at the people we care about. If we don't give our full attention to the cashier who is asking about our day, it reinforces that we don't need to be present when talking with family or friends. If you keep choosing to flirt with your coworker, your commitment to your partner and your marriage disintegrates.

The small actions that we think happen in isolated parts of our life can become habits that affect the whole. With regular practice, this repetitive action can cause injury.

Choose Your Focus, The Remix

This morning I was listening to an interview that Mary Oliver gave to Krista Tippett for the radio show On Being. Mary Oliver is my favorite poet, and I fell even more in love with her and her work as I listened to the conversation. Krista mentioned that paying attention seemed to be a common theme in Mary's body of poetry, to which Mary readily agreed. She has spent much of her life wandering through the woods near her home with notebook in hand, giving her full attention to the natural world and being inspired by what she has witnessed. 

Her arguably most famous poem, "The Summer Day," specifically mentions paying attention and seems like a beautiful exclamation point to my musings about being mindful from earlier this week. Every time I read this poem, I get to the end and just sit quietly with awe at the magnitude of that question. What am I going to do with this one life?

I am realizing that the answer starts with a much smaller but equally important question. What am I going to do with this moment?

My answer? I'm going to pay attention.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Choose Your Focus

If you have practiced yoga, you have likely heard the teacher say to focus your eyes on something stationary as you undertake a balance such as tree pose. The lingo for this action is drishti, which loosely means resting your gaze on a fixed point. Concentrating on a static spot can be a tremendous help in keeping yourself steady when attempting to stand on one leg or perform a head stand, but it is useful when practicing basic postures as well. 

When you focus your eyes on something in this way, you are asking yourself to truly see what's in front of you. You aren't just looking at it or past it or through it; you are seeing whatever it is for what it is. This may be very different from our everyday experience, because most of us aren't very good at paying attention to what's happening right in front of us. Whether it's blowing through a stop sign on the way to work or kissing a partner on autopilot in a rush to get out the door, we are rarely giving our full attention to what is happening right now. 

When you bring your full awareness to the moment at hand, you may naturally find that your sensory experience is heightened because your thoughts become quieter. Your hearing might become sharper, allowing you to trace the sound of your breath. You might start to notice your sense of touch and where you are resting the weight in your feet, how it feels to be rooted down into your mat. Or your awareness of where you are in space might increase so you know without looking that your right arm has dropped from its position parallel to the ground. All of these sensations help you to be mindful of what is happening on your mat right now instead of simply plowing through the motions. 

As with most things in yoga, this is extremely relevant in our every day life. Being mindful is a commonplace phrase right now, and rightly so because it's important! But what does it mean? Being mindful simply means giving your full attention to the moment. It means ignoring the argument you might be replaying in your head and softening your mind instead, letting it go. It means using the senses to be right where you are, listening to the person speaking, feeling the rain on your face, or tasting the dinner that your partner made for you. We spend so much time rushing through one thing just to move onto the next. Instead, we could focus on where we are right now and put all that energy into the moment at hand.